Staff scheduling in job rotation environments considering ergonomic aspects and preservation of qualifications

Abstract

Demographic change is a well-known influencing factor challenging social security systems in industrialized countries. In a manufacturing context, companies need to cope with an increasingly heterogeneous workforce in terms of qualification and impairments, as well as an increasing average age. The development of more standardized processes and the trend to move towards shorter lead times, paired with demographic changes in the workforce, reveal a strong importance of staff planning.A short-term staff planning system which generates job rotation schedules taking into consideration workers’ qualifications, the workplace’s ergonomic exposure, and the most recent allocations of each worker is sought to ensure the right worker is allocated to the right work place at the right time. The arising complexity of such scheduling problems is met in this paper by using a linear programming based heuristic, which solves the scheduling problem gradually for each rotation round and generates a holistic job rotation schedule for an entire workday.The presented approach to short-term staff scheduling is implemented in a VBA-based software prototype and was tested in the final assembly line of a German automotive manufacturer.